


Four: The Safe Word.

by Formaldehyde (Johnlockology)



Series: A Study In Grief [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Canon Divergence - The Reichenbach Fall, F/M, POV First Person, POV Sherlock Holmes, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-10 18:53:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/789089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Johnlockology/pseuds/Formaldehyde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes takes a trip, strikes a deal, and tries to remember How It All Began.</p><p>Note: This chapter will make more sense when read immediately following the first three installments of the A Study in Grief Series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four: The Safe Word.

[January 20th]

She asks for a calf slaughtered fresh that morning.

“In fact,” she grins at the headwaiter, “if it bleats a little, when I cut into it, I won’t be at all put out.” The man she has summoned from across the dining room makes no demur. It’s clear that he has tended to her specific culinary needs before. He inclines his head, turns on his heel, and heads towards the kitchens. To the untalented eye, he appears quite unaffected, professional distance pressed into the starched linen of his shirtfront.

I can tell that Irene Adler has made him terrified. She has done so on this and several other occasions, in the company of different dinner guests. I can tell that she has asked him to plate up worse requests, garnish them with bay leaves and wedges of lemon, and bring them to her throughout a blistering summer night, long after the other restaurant patrons have departed. No doubt he is paid for his attention with significant recompense. Payment doesn’t blot out fear, however. I can read that in the cast of his back, the polished deference of his tones, the jittery scratch his orthography makes on the order pad. Payment simply makes it easier to live with the things one has done.

When he’s out of earshot, she looks at me, her glance slicing down to my closed menu.

“You haven’t ordered.” Her mouth is so red that it stuns, at first. It’s not garish, that’s not the word. It's precise. The hue of her lipstick is intentional, as is everything about her. It is one of the ways in which we match, tonight and every other night in which we have met. The last time I saw her, her lips were unpainted, and when she pressed them to my cheek, they were damp with her own grateful tears. She didn’t even protest when I moved away from her, then. Her eyes kept thanking me, clear across the executioners’ empty landing. She looked as though she might thank me forever.

It is not the way she looks tonight. Miss Adler lifts her wineglass, reaches over the table to extend a toast. When I do not offer mine in response, she smirks, taps the rim of her crystal flute against the side of its untouched companion. She bares her throat as she tilts her head back, sets the glass next to mine as though she were framing an uninspired before and after comparative photograph.

“I don’t eat when I’m on a case.”

There is a solitary, long-stemmed candle between us. It tapers to the thickness of a thimble’s head, dotting rubicund wax on the jacquard tablecloth.

Her bracelet catches the low light as she reaches for the wine I will not drink. “You’re not on a case, are you, Mr. Holmes? After all, there isn’t an awful lot that the dead might deduce.” She lets her hand wrap around my left wrist, the bare expanse of her arm a lintel of invitation between us, its drawbridge lowered, the moat hinting of claret and crocodiles alike.

I do not pull my hand away. “I’m not dead, Irene. We’re having dinner.”

She bares her teeth at me, beams. The diamonds on her bracelet are arranged in three parallel rows. They are the only adornment she has chosen for tonight’s meeting, the only decoration that I can so far discern. What lies beneath her armour is another story, waiting to be told in a place I’ve not yet been. The _maître d’hôtel_ returns. Miss Adler cuts into the veal, and I watch the blade of her knife stain as she recounts the requests I have made, in between bites.

“You want to know about Jim Moriarty’s network – no,” she corrects herself, spearing a pink sliver, “you want to know Jim’s intimates, his inner circle of best-equipped lackeys and compatriots. You want to know who was training the rifle scopes on your… friends,” she stresses the last word, dips the veal into a bay of red wine reduction, trails her fork around a lazy inlet as she eyes my mouth.

“Yes.”

“It’ll cost you, Mr. Holmes.”

“Oh yes, Miss Adler,” I nod, watching her down what remains of that morning’s kill. “I imagine so.”

♦♦♦

Irene Adler knows a great many things.

In this moment, for instance, she knows that the tie around my neck feels like a pre-assembled gallows. I can feel her breath sharpen in approval as she loosens it, letting it ribbon out into her palms, a scrap of pure silk fashioned right here in the heart of the city, a city that belongs to neither of us. She came here months ago to escape, and I’ve come here in pursuit of information. We are both lost children, tonight, playing at being adventurers. We are both unmoored, with no legions to command, no dread captains to fight, no time to carve out from the ticking belly of a great beast.

We deserve nothing but each other.

“You’re trembling,” she hisses against my ear, but this is untrue. I don’t move a muscle when her teeth drag against my jugular, because I don’t need to be startled. Not yet.

“It’ll cost you, Sherlock,” she warned me, thirty minutes ago over the most ostentatious of dinner tables. “It’ll cost you,” she reminded me, on the limousine drive to her apartments, slotted into one of the most inconspicuous zones of the Duomo district. From the exterior, it’s even charming – a starter home to build a wish on. Everything changes when you step inside. On the inside, it’s bigger, but there are no Doctors within. You will find the tools of the surgical trade, perhaps, but no one proficient in the timeless art of knowing how to still bloodflow, how to tourniquet hurt. Here, you will encounter the opposite.

“It’ll cost you.”

The tie, now clamped between her teeth, is the lilac of so many bridesmaids’ dresses of weddings past, patterned with silver skulls. It was the most expensive of its kind, in the Luisa Via Roma where I spent precisely fifteen minutes being outfitted.

“Your body is a designer’s wet dream,” the attendant there had purred noncommittally, sizing me up with the professional acuity that’s steam-pressed into his trade, ringing up a stack of purchases with which one might finance a week of treatments for a juvenile cancer ward. He touched me familiarly but without enthusiasm, which was best. He didn’t know for what fate he was fitting me, to what ends he selected what I wear now.

His eyes were lined with amber. His skin was scented with adrenaline and bergamot, with lingering cypress and sex – commercial, useful sex.

“Make me smell like you do,” I’d instructed him, sliding the new credit card into his upturned palm. It had been an easy thing.

In Irene Adler’s bedroom, there are no ghosts, mercifully. She leans into me, mouths my safe word against my carotid. Oh, this thrills her; _this_ works her over, the xylophonic suggestion of pattering out experimental notes where my blood flows beneath the flesh. She wants to mark the places she could stop up my heartbeat the fastest. The deceit of it, however, stunts the act from gaining any true altitude on her ladder of manipulations.

She loves me too much for that, but not too much for what she’s about to do next. 

“If you refuse me anything, I’ll tell him. I will tell John Watson you’re alive.”

I blink, just once, to show that I’ve understood. The skull-spotted tie slides round her left wrist like a sympathetic viper, kissing and biting her bare forearm in equal measure. She holds a riding crop in her right hand.

“Get on your knees.”

She’s ordered the bespoke instrument especially for tonight, the way a normal woman would agonize over which satin and lace confection might best reignite a lover’s sagging ardour. She’s spent time, and no mean sum of money, on its construction and shipment. I can tell, by the way she grips it, fondling its engraved dome, that the beautiful thing has been formatted for her bones’ ownership, and no others. Nor will she use the crop on anyone else. Nor will she ever wipe it clean.

The safe word she’s offered me rings between my ears with the strangulated insistency of a parochial choir being marched to the abattoir. It is a word I can never use, and this is why she’s chosen it. This safe word is a double-negative, a false panel for an empty strongbox. It protects nothing.

The safe word locks me before the feet of The Woman, with no possible escape, and for this, for this mercy, I feel my heart bloom with gratitude in the very instant that the crop cuts into my lower back.

“Lean forward, little lamb,” she murmurs. “Place your palms on the floor. Good. Just like that.”

The only sound in the room is the growing rush of her breathing, and the measured tap of her heels as she paces, slightly. It displeases her that I haven’t gasped, and when the crop descends on my back a second time, it licks a line of fire across my cloth-covered muscles, curving perfectly over my spine.

She hasn’t begun to show me what this silversmithed treasure of hers can truly do.

“Take off your shirt. Stay on your knees, little lamb,” she advises, as I try to rise, my hands making quick work of the buttons, careful not to tear any out by their threads. She tugs the fabric from my shoulders herself, drapes it over the fainting couch just on the periphery of my blurring line of sight.

The first time the leather laps devotedly against my bare back, it draws blood. I feel the wetness stain the already rising weals of the first two marks, and when she strikes me again, the fourth line from the crop stuns me forward on my knees, slightly. I blink as I watch my knuckles whiten, noticing that they gleam in the low boudoir light with a spectral sheen of sweat.

Here come the ghosts, after all, I note. They are stealing in through the cracks beneath her soundproofed doors. They are hungry, and my blood will feed them.

When she hits me again, I know what to do.

I gasp. I let her taste my pain, and she thrills to the false-fronted suggestion, her hand and its leather-silver-bone extension slicing into me, over and over, drawing from me the one thing I can’t exact from myself. Not this well.

Irene Adler grafts my new ley-lines, and every one of them points away from John Watson.

I decide to stop counting. Measurement is tedious. It’s better to treat each blow as a novelty, a dripping confection. I close my eyes, tilting my chin up slightly like a blind, serviceable hound receiving a badge of merit for fealty. I smile as I resist the urge to pant, ludicrously. She thinks this is the price I’ll pay for the information I need. She thinks I must do this, to start tracking down the scope-gazing henchmen of James Moriarty.

She is wrong. There are other ways to find out what she knows. There have always been other ways.

“Get up,” she growls, and oh, the tremor in her voice is at least mildly fascinating; the cadence of her velvet rasp jitters, as though she’s the one with a back laid bare. Her hands reach out to hold me safe as I jerk upright, sending the crop clattering, smearing across the panelled floorboards. I arc out of reach of her lacquered nails, my knuckles grazing the bedsheets as I try to turn my body towards her mouth, because I know what she wants, naturally, and the unwritten contract we are unfurling between us means that I must honour each of my promises with my blood.

She’s so disgustingly, boringly in love.

The smooth pad of her right thumb is bright with the outrageous ballot mark she’s lifted from my lower back. I stand perfectly still as she undoes each article of her trousseau. Tonight, she has dressed like a bride attending her groom’s funeral. She has covered her body in the raiment of one both eager and loath to put me into the earth. The scent of my whipping intensifies as she discards the layers of lace and watered silk.  

Irene Adler nooses the skull-spangled tie around my neck once more, draws it tight to the base of my throat, then pulls me forward.

_1998\. Barafundle Bay. Your soft, sticky cuss word of a mouth, sweet with vanilla cornetto and a chocolate beedie. Your twenty one year old mouth melting open in the seaside sun._

_[This is how it happened, didn’t it, my Love? This is the real story of how we met. I had to endure this crucible to find the truth, and I’m enduring, I am. Look at me. I’m being so good. Why, I haven’t flinched. I haven’t trembled once.]_

“Stop thinking about him,” she orders, dragging me to her lips by the tie's flagging gallows. My collar winches; my lungs constrict. I take a breath and the river running down my back spills, stains the pressed fabric of my trousers in the dripping minutes before she tugs them off.

Her body is unmarked and smoother than your own cheeks have been when they are rivered with your good tears. She’s as blanched as corpses, my Love, but you know that already. The only red line on her body runs over her mouth, and when I kiss her, I taste a new river. I drink and I drink deep from her crimson tide.

She drags me onto her body, fixes her heel points over the base of my spine. She has left my tie on and discarded the rest, and she uses the silk to summon me closer, closer, til we are staring into each others’ eyes. She wants to make sure that hers are the only eyes I see tonight.

Irene Adler fends off an orgasm the second I sink into her, because we both know she’s waited far too long for this. She’s bled the backs and thighs of virgins and whores in breathless anticipation, but nothing has approximated the sensation of my weight pinning her down, my teeth furrowing an intersection in her neck’s now-marked column.

I am expected to leave these marks. Her heels press deeper into my back, and dutifully, I bite her harder. I sink my incisors further still, and she groans in approval when I taste the telltale threads of copper.

She’s so tense, so reined in with her own perverse forbearance, that I can barely move. Her fingers twist in my hair, dragging my face back into her line of vision, because she can’t decide whether she wants to be pillaged or perceived. When she smiles, I feel the muscles in my jaw respond in kind, functioning as though a mimetic mirror were between us. She’s astonished at how rigid I am, anchored inside her taut and unyielding flesh. She shouldn’t be, because this is nothing more than science, the ways in which we have flung ourselves together. She could be wearing a gargoyle’s wincing mask, and it would make no difference. She could be painted in the tears of a slaughtered lamb, fresh and redolent with massacred grief.

_[I know that I am morbid. That was among the first things you told me, as you will recall, on our ferry ride to Wales. Yes, of course that’s how we met.]_

_“How many exams are you missing due to this, er, impromptu getaway?”_

_“Just three.”_

_“Oh, bloody hell. You didn’t say, earlier. I thought you were mostly done this term. Jesus. Won’t you have a devil of a time, catching up?”_

_“Well, no,” I said to you, turning with my back against the rail, grinning hard despite myself, the sun setting your eyes to a squint that, even then, unlaced my best resolve, undid me against my will. “I’ll be fine. I’m_ quite _clever.”_

_The setting sun spent its last points of purchase in your hair, those fine, blonde strands layered over your brow, shorn neatly around your ears, cut low at your nape. Your hair was almost military in its unassuming, plain design. Pieces of you belonged to the army even then, though you didn’t know it._

_Barafundle Bay stretches out before us, opens arms I’ve never thought the land could possess before today, before this ferry ride, before your pale hair and quiet acknowledgement of my genius made me think the land could wrap around one, that the hills could choke against the sea with desire carved by a mad and absent designer’s hand. The hills could choke_

_choke_

choke

I cannot breathe. A silk skull winks, wrapped around the circumference of her wrist. I watch as she draws her phalanges down. I feel the reservoir of my last inhalation deplete, trickling from my nostrils, winnowing out. My hips are soldered to hers so tightly that I cannot prise them off without startling the skin of my back into her stilettos. I cannot breathe.

“I told you.” Her voice is a deluge of concern, drenched in honey and lime for the sorest of throats, a mummy’s dulcet remonstration against the child who gags on one too many boiled sweets.

My eyelids flutter closed, murdered moths bedding down in their twin graveyards. She twists the tie sharply around her wrist a second time. More skulls grin against her knuckles now. I don’t need to see to know. She drags me down until my parted mouth grazes her moving lips. Her breath flickers over my teeth.

“You are forbidden to think of him.”

She twists the tie a third time. The bay flickers into focus; the hills reach for my bare body. The saltwater laps into my new ley lines. I am scoured. I am not the same as I was before. When you are dead, when you are drowned or else fall from a very great height indeed, you learn the Truth above all Truths: you will never be what you were, before you perished and before you fell.

When she relaxes her hold on the tie, I do not splutter or singe the air with my grateful sobs. I kiss her. I kiss her, and finally, in the savage glide of incisor against tongue, blood welling in both our mouths like a child’s knees first encountering a ragged scrap of playground, finally, I begin to give her what she wants.

Her heels gouge new grottoes against my skin, and it’s perfect, and it also doesn’t matter. I hear nothing but the roar of the ocean in my ears, and it is roaring even more loudly than her voice can rise. Each breaking swell of her screams echoes in turns both hoarse and hollow, as she uses up what’s in her lungs to bellow commands I already know.

In this moment, as she ascends a spiral staircase carved from living bone, Irene has forgotten that I once took her pulse. I attuned myself to the places beneath her skin she then felt too bashful to show. Every place my body now touches her is formatted to burn. There are blisters blooming on the backs of her knees where my hands are levering her thighs wider, and she’s still sealed somewhere, still locked and barricaded but it doesn’t matter. I sink my teeth into her neck and grind my hips forward, and something gives within her, some new river bursts its concealment cache, moisture seeping onto our welded flanks. She is breaking, and she has saved this for me. She has selected and appointed me her destroyer. The Woman splinters as I thrust into her, my body looming and locking out every scrap of moonlight from descending on her skin. The things unknotting from her throat and oozing across my damp brow, my gritted teeth, have no scientific provenance. Their own language governs them, and somewhere in this lexicography lurks the enshrined impression of my sacred name.

I shatter her. I wound her. I do it over, and over, and when I break her for the third time, Irene Adler throws her head back, bares the toppled column of her throat, and she howls with delight.

"Wait," she whispers as I rise from the ruined bedsheets. I blink and the bedroom swims, or else it falls. I think it does both. She reaches beneath the pillows, draws forth a scalpel. 

"We're not done yet," she weakly smiles.

♦♦♦

Kate bandages me. She winds the gauze around my midriff, soothes four metal clasps onto my right side to keep the fabric still. I catch her eyes with mine as we stand together in the foyer. Her irises are complex. They defy the assignment of one specific hue. In the low light of Miss Adler’s sconce lanterns, they are sand dunes before the first breath of a hurricane scatters the hollow cairns to flying across the beach. Her eyes are sand racing towards the sea, borne aloft on the pewter wings of an oncoming storm. There is poetry there, I would once have been told. Before tonight, I would not have believed it. I would not have been looking for the hollow spaces from which marrow is sucked out, into whose forcibly formed grottoes new things are inserted.

Violation is the only form of poetry written in these apartments, and there is only one hand allowed to grasp the grinning quill. Under any other circumstances, this would not faze me.

Kate rests her palms on my covered back. We both feel the fabric thicken, swell with weight. When she pulls her hands away, her horoscope lines have been coloured in. Her eyelashes sweep down, concealing the whorls of shifting sand in the look she wants to give me, as she reaches into the antique physician’s kit that rests at her heels. Kate begins to unfurl more gauze, retrieves a second set of cunning metal teeth to trap the fibres together.

“Are you being kept here against your will?”

She smooths the second layer around me. The four metal pins prick my left side, each smart jab more pointed than the last. Her wrists jerk as she drags them from my sides. The bandage is pinned fast, and when I inhale, sensation shoots pure and sharp through my ribs, infusing my breath with liquid that leaks. She smiles, the lacquer on her bottom lip faulting into a miniature crack, a single line splitting the veneer, baring a ribbon of her unpainted skin.

She smiles, because she knows. She has bound me beyond the point of comfort.

My question slides into the fault line along her lower lip. I watch as she breathes it into her mouth and absorbs it as the poison it was not intended to be. When she exhales, venom drips down her jaw, and her voice is stained deep with derision.

Oh, I think, oh, even before I hear the first syllables of response. Oh, how wonderful. What an unsought blessing. I will keep it. I will tuck it deep beneath these layers of punishing gauze, selfishly. I will not wash Kate’s present from my scissored-open lumbar map.

I suppress the beatific grin that fights to sweep clean over my face when she spits out the blessed words in my direction. Her breath crests, hot and furious, over my cheeks.

“You are an idiot,” Kate whispers, and her eyes are spilling sand across a savaged bay, asking me for a taste, for a solitary whip kiss of what she was not given freely. I am an idiot. Yes.

How perfect, to have been so wrong. There is nowhere she would rather be more than in these apartments in Florence, and beneath my skin, under my tongue, soaked into the gauze that corsets me, is evidence of what she wants most and cannot have. She would tear the surgical veil from my body this instant, propriety be damned, and suck the copper straight from the threads. She would clot her unblessed skin with the proof that someone, someone once earned the right to be so favoured. She will never beg at the source, because she knows better. She is not the idiot in this equation, after all.

From the bedroom suite, Kate and I hear the sounds of music, stirring, and the unmistakeable sounds of a woman singing along. Her voice is crisp, well-modulated, and precise. It lands atop every note, grinding its stilettoed mezzo-soprano into each chord. She sings the way I play the violin.

Were I a singer, and a woman, I would sound just as she does. 

“Kate.” My voice is as clear as a bay that waits with the last breath to be drawn, right before the sky splits open. I button my shirt, and I do not frown. I do not linger on each enclosure, and when I raise my arms to straighten my collar, I do not cry out.

“Have you been to Barafundle Bay, Kate?”

She frowns, shakes her head.

“No?” I grin. I am grinning terribly, wrenching my own face open. I am half-grimace, half-snarl. I don’t need to see myself to know; I see what I resemble in the way the sand shifts backwards in her eyes, retreating to higher ground, running from brackish water.

“No, neither have I.”

My mobile buzzes against my flank. I retrieve it, open up the new document entitled "Sebastian Moran".

♦♦♦

[January 27th]

_[Mind Palace Notes]_

The Parco Piscina Le Pavionere at night. My last night in Florence.

I wanted to be somewhere that didn’t just hint of chlorine. I wanted to be somewhere that forced it into my lungs with each breath. I’m here because I’m remembering that night, and it seems safer to do that here than in my blue and lilac Lungarno rooms. 

Though that’s a bit not good, isn’t it, John, fibbing in my own mind palace. I don’t care about being safe, so long as you are. Oh yes, the great over-gesticulated conceit of it, right? I’m not selfless, you stupid, stupid man. I’m selfish. I’m the most selfish person we know.

How much do you suppose I was thinking of *your* life, when I wrenched that horrid semtex jacket from your shoulders? Your shoulders that were subtly rigged with shivers from the inside. 

I was thinking only of myself. Of waking up to 221B without tea having been made for me, by you. Without hearing your soft, sleep-hoarse tenor swearing beneath your breath, at the eyeballs in your toothbrush cup. At your capable hands that have never missed a target in my defense. At your ridiculous, endearingly mawkish blog posts, and how the people would lap them up, licking at your cheeks for affection and attention, for more and more news about us and our derring-do. 

I was thinking only of myself. And then you kissed me.

You kissed me and you changed everything, you fool. I tasted the fear on you, the tamped-down rage, the heat and longing and sweet, dumb heart of you, and though kissing has always seemed pointless to me, a disgusting expedition towards an inevitably dissatisfying conclusion, we both felt me stir hard against your hip. We both tasted the delight in me. We both knew it was different, that it would go on changing.

Do you recall how that night ended, John? Your blog followers, were they privy, might have expected us to shag right there at poolside, sending buttons flying and fabric ripping in a wild carnal romp. But no.

Quietly, we took a cab back home. I refused to let go of your hand the entire time. I’m fairly sure I was gripping your fingers too tightly, cutting off your circulation, but you said nothing. I paid the cabbie; we went upstairs. Mrs. Hudson was long since sleeping. The flat was deathly quiet. We sat across each other on the Thinking Couch, and you kept on kissing me.

I think maybe at some point  you got up and made us tea, while I sat on the sofa alone and tried to format it, to process it into an identifiable cubbyhole. It wouldn’t fit, John. It still doesn’t.

Kissing was more than enough to go on, as you’d say. As you did say, the morning after, your cheeks flushed and your nose reddened from laughter and wonder. 

You knew, didn’t you, you colossal moron, that kissing was all I could absorb without shattering, without splitting and sliding into the creases of the sofa, without falling off the edges of the world before logic mapped it into a sphere. So you kissed me, and kissed me, and stroked my cheek, and you called me “marvellous”, and you exhaled “beautiful, so ruddy beautiful, Sherlock,” and for the very first time, I was fiendishly glad to look like anything specific, like something you’d want between your thighs and jammed to your breastbone. 

You were tender, and patient, and good. And you wrecked everything.

And I let you.

**Author's Note:**

> This series is written by two authors working under the main pseud Johnlockology. Formaldehyde pens all sections contained in A Study In Grief written from Sherlock Holmes' POV, while Darjeeling supplies those written from the POV of John Watson, tag-team style!


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